If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.

Naturally, there are times when every woman likes to be flattered… to feel she is the most important thing in someone’s world. Only a man can paint this picture.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

Through my films I’m eventually trying to one day tell the truth. I don’t know if I’m ever going to get there, but I’m slowly letting pieces of myself out there and then maybe by the time I’m 85, I’ll look back and say, ‚All right, that about sums it up.‘

If you have to stand and fight, you train yourself so that you’re able to do it.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.

Being elected to Congress, though I am very grateful to our friends for having done it, has not pleased me as much as I expected.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

The only way round is through.

Probably because I’m from a middle class family, I have that nature in me that I don’t get too excited with big things.

You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

It takes a long time to bring the past up to the present.

No one undertakes research in physics with the intention of winning a prize. It is the joy of discovering something no one knew before.

Whoever does not regard what he has as most ample wealth, is unhappy, though he be master of the world.

What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.

If it doesn’t work out there will never be any doubt that the pleasure was worth all the pain.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.

To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

If you’re doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality. But you really don’t know what was going on in the person’s mind. You just know what was going on in the minds of people around him.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

There are worse things in life than death. Have you ever spent an evening with an insurance salesman?

At first when I heard about climate change, I was a climate denier. I didn’t think it was happening. Because if there really was an existential crisis like that, that would threaten our civilisation, we wouldn’t be focusing on anything else. That would be our first priority. So I didn’t understand how that added up.

A woman is like a tea bag – you can’t tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.

There are some people who hate my guts. But that goes with the territory.

I don’t mind people hating me, because it pushes me.

Most of us aren’t defeated in one decisive battle. We are defeated one tiny, seemingly insignificant surrender at a time that chips away at who we should really be.

I’ve found men are less likely to let petty things annoy them.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt that same kind of peace, the kind of serenity that I felt after acknowledging that maybe I was going to die of this TB.

How do you know what it’s like to be stupid if you’ve never been smart?

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

Before success comes in any man’s life, he’s sure to meet with much temporary defeat and, perhaps some failures. When defeat overtakes a man, the easiest and the most logical thing to do is to quit. That’s exactly what the majority of men do.

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.

It was really hard for them to intimidate me. They felt I was intimidating. One of the growers had a name for me: I think it was ‚dragon lady‘ or something like it.

Christmas is a tonic for our souls. It moves us to think of others rather than of ourselves. It directs our thoughts to giving.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

I’m an idealist without illusions.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

It is not doing the thing we like to do, but liking the thing we have to do, that makes life blessed.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

There is a very fine line between loving life and being greedy for it.

My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

There’s no one thing that is true. They’re all true.

Whatever the universal nature assigns to any man at any time is for the good of that man at that time.

As we must account for every idle word, so must we account for every idle silence.

Here in America, we don’t let our differences tear us apart. Not here. Because we know that our greatness comes from when we appreciate each other’s strengths, when we learn from each other, when we lean on each other, because in this country, it’s never been each person for themselves. No, we’re all in this together. We always have been.

The vegetable life does not content itself with casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish, thousands may plant themselves, that hundreds may come up, that tens may live to maturity; that, at least one may replace the parent.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

My mother’s love has always been a sustaining force for our family, and one of my greatest joys is seeing her integrity, her compassion, her intelligence reflected in my daughters.

God wants to bless us where we are.

As a musician and a songwriter, it is an act of the ego to believe that other people might be interested in your point of view. But it is usually an empathetic nature that gets you going in the first place.

You know when you’re young and you see a play in high school, and the guys all have gray in their hair and they’re trying to be old men and they have no idea what that’s like? It’s just that stupid the other way around.

Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble.

The happiest part of a man’s life is what he passes lying awake in bed in the morning.

As soon as you have a language that has a past tense and a future tense you’re going to say, ‚Where did we come from, what happens next?‘ The ability to remember the past helps us plan the future.

Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive.

We occasionally stumble over the truth but most of us pick ourselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.